


HOW TO RAISE YOUR MUTANT WRIGGLER WHEN AN ENTIRE PLANET WANTS HIM DEAD

by AcrylicMist



Series: kenesis-stuck [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternia is Terrible, Canon Compliant, Depression, Family Bonding, Family Feels, Hemospectrum, Minor Character Death, Murder, Mutilation, Other, Pesterlog(s) (Homestuck), SBURB/SGRUB, SGRUB, Self-Harm, making new friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-08
Updated: 2018-06-12
Packaged: 2019-05-19 14:46:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14875763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AcrylicMist/pseuds/AcrylicMist
Summary: Being a lusis is hard.Being Karkat's lusis is worse.





	1. The beginning

**Author's Note:**

> I had to fight myself on posting this, because it belongs as a aside to something I haven't posted yet. Clearly, I lost the fight, so consider this a sneak-peek of my next series.
> 
> Please, please mind the tags. Like always, I mean every one of them.

How to raise your mutant wriggler when an entire planet wants him dead. 

 

==> Crabdad: observe wriggler

It was small. Smaller than it should be, but it was growling and hissing like it had the size of a musclebeast behind it. It’s tiny teeth were bared as it attempted to back away. 

The huge lusus raised its claws to clack at the wriggler menacingly, just to test it. The noise echoed and the wriggler hissed eagerly in reply. The crab paused. 

There were other wrigglers nearby, lots of them. These trees were filled with other wrigglers to choose from as the victors left the brooding caverns and finished their great trek to the surface. The lusus could feel them, feel the life pounding in their small and vulnerable bodies. Each one called to him, called to the inbred instinct to nurture and raise a species not his own. 

But this one stopped him. The grub was covered in so much dust that it was just a gray-black smudge with a wild mop of dark hair. The wriggler was sitting at the edge of a strange burnt crater that made his pale carapace itch with wariness, but the tiny wriggler snarled again and his mind was made.

This one would the one for him, the one with nubby baby teeth and a fighter’s bloodpusher. With his tiny size, it would need that fearless will to face down foes. And this world was full of foes.

The crab stepped closer, jointed legs creaking as he hedged his weight to gently, very gently, pin the wriggler down with one massive claw. The grub shrieked it’s indignation to the sky, an ear-splitting cry of tiny rage. It was adorable and served to cement the crab’s choice of charge. 

The lusis plucked the young troll off the scorched ground and settled it, still screeching, into the folded crook of his left claw. The sun would start rising soon, and he needed to make sure that his new charge was safe and sheltered before the burning light of morning came. 

The grub began to quiet down as the crab wove through the trees. He knew of a cave nearby that would serve as a day’s worth of protection. 

The underground was very crammed. He had to stoop to fit his large carapace through the small opening, but the inside of the tunnel was damp and cool and dark. The crab heard noises, the shuffle of fur over stone, and he turned, beaked mouth dropping open and ready to rip. 

A large catbeast looked back at him, it’s white fur nearly glowing in the gloom. It’s upper mouth held a fat green grub the color of fresh grass, and it’s lower mouth was bared in a very toothy and vicious silent snarl. The cat stalked into the cave, tail swishing. 

The two lusii regarded each other without moving. The truce was still in place until the next time the moons rose, and each one had other, more deadly foes to worry about.

The cat moved deeper into the cave. The crab settled down near the entrance. He didn’t fancy being underground. He longed for sand and sea.

More lusii streamed into the cave, each with its own wriggler. He saw most colors of their rainbow inked across the slightly bulbous bodies of the young trolls as their new custodians crept past. 

It made him realize that he knew not the bloodcolor of his own charge. The grub, exhausted by the night’s activities, had nestled against his carapace and had at last stopped screaming and dozed off. Careful not to wake it, the crab bent his head and began to lick away the dust and the dirt that obscured it. 

He paused, his beady eyes glistening as he dipped his head closer to the grub. He rubbed at the small patch of clean skin to make sure this was no trick.

There, in the non-existent light of the cave, was a blush of color the lusis knew only in memories programmed into his thinkpan. Not lowly rust, and not the brighter shades of royalties in purple and violet that he was strongly drawn to serve. 

This color was red- A searing crimson that should not have been possible. 

Quickly, the crab turned away from the others in the cave, shielding his grub from any other monster that might see. Truce or not, the lusis knew that rules of mercy didn’t apply to mutants or the disabled. He rubbed more dirt over the patch he’d licked clean to hide the truth.

While the grub slept and the crab waited for the moons to rise, he thought. 

Lusii were programmed by science and nature to highly favor one bloodcaste over all others. The crab had spent generations raising purplebloods by the sea, or even the violets with their finned ears. That was all he knew, and a multitude of instincts were screaming at him to simply cull the mutant wriggler. A mistake had been made, yes, but that was easy to remedy. Surely he could find a new lucky wriggler squashed under a rock’s cleft in the morning, or he could find another lusis and overpower it to take its wriggler for his own. This should not even have been an issue for a lusis as large and strong as the crab was.

But there must have been a flaw, a glitch in his internal systems that made all of these programmed responses muted. There was no urge to cull the aberration. The crab lusis looked at his mutant charge and felt only the urge to protect and to nurture. The bond had been made- the grub was his.  
…

 

Getting the imperial building drones to cooperate was another matter. Every hatching season the metallic robanoids drove the crab mad with impatience, and he clacked his claws and screeched at the drones until he managed to call a few down to him.

His grub, Karkat, unpupated and squishy-soft, was still covered in a careful layer of mud and dirt. It was better that the drones thought the crab was just a messy lusus. The unholy (sacred) red color of the grub’s body must stay hidden until he pupated into his troll form where the color would be easier to hide.

The drones were not intelligent creatures by design. They bumbled around, crashed into things, quarreled with each other, anything to ignore the cries of the crab and a young Karkat. In response, Karkat screamed louder, and the drones listened to him. The tiny grub purred into the crook of Crabdad’s claw as he screeched the drones into submission and the hivering took shape around them. 

Karkat kept their hive small, ordinary. It was surprisingly easy to marshal the young troll into a building mood, and Karkat knew, even as young as he was, to make sure the small hive was as secure as possible.

When the drones were finished, Crabdad took Karkat into their newly built hive and locked the door behind them.

…

 

Karkat grew fast after his first pupation, which took too long and left the lusus in a state of panic for the entire length of the extra perigree it took for Karkat to claw his way free of the cocoon. The grub, no longer a grub, was a uniform gray with stick-thin limbs and a shake in his core. Karkat’s gray eyes were too large in his thin face, his breath heaving as he scrabbled at the floor with newly-formed claws on the ends of fingers he didn’t know how to use yet. 

Crabdad heard the noises of Karkat, new and wet and confused, screeching from his respiteblock and the lusis ran to him. His charge was on the floor in a puddle of pink-tinged slime, the pale fuzzy ruin of the destroyed cocoon behind him.

Filled with a relief so sharp it burned, Crabdad screeched and snatched Karkat off of the floor, the young troll sticky with his recent pupation. The huge lusis crooned and clicked, nuzzling his charge as he licked the slime off him and checked him over to make sure he’d emerged with the correct number of limbs. 

Karkat had the right number of strut-pods and fingers. Everything was in place and correctly-formed, even if the young troll was sick with exhaustion after the long change. Pupation had hit him hard, harder than most trolls, and the threat of Crabdad’s charge never emerging from his cocoon had been a real fear. 

But that was in the past. He had a warm, breathing Karkat in his claws, a Karkat who looked safe, who looked normal, and the lusis had to know, had to see if the pupation had healed or at least buried the flaw that would one day get him killed, so while Karkat was still weak and soft with limpness, Crabdad drug the end on his claw gently across the center of Karkat’s new hand.

The gray skin split easily and Karkat writhed, squeaking and hissing, a growl in his throat as he snatched his bleeding hand to his bare chest and looked at his lusis with those too-large eyes, filled with shock and betrayal. The blood was bright enough that it nearly glowed, vivid and corrupted, as it ran down Karkat’s chest. 

With a heavy bloodpusher, the crab turned to the wardrobifier and dabbed the spot of Karkat’s blood onto the indicator. Normally he would never have activated the wardrobifier with a mutant sample, but the same flaw in his thinking that let him keep the mutant troll urged him to enter in a true sample without fear of discovery.

The wardrobifier whirred, it pinged, it took too long to make up it’s mind about what hatchsign to assign the young troll, but at last the light turned green and a shirt came out of the bottom flap of the machine. The sharp words scrolled past the monitor, branding Karkat with his official name, hatchsign, and Empire-identification for the planet’s records. 

Hatchsign: Vantas, Karkat  
Hivering: 534-11ab-9  
Bi-lunar perigree, dark season #200,987  
Bloodcaste: [redacted]  
Allowance: 35,000 credits.

Karkat, already forgetting the brief sting of betrayal, crept closer with wide eyes. The small wound on his hand had already stopped bleeding, and Crabdad hissed and clicked to himself as he unfolded the black shirt to look at the sign.

Karkat’s hatchsign was a blank, anonymous gray in a symbol that the lusis didn’t recognize. It was no hatchsign he knew, and the lusis was old enough that he knew a lot of hatchsigns and bloodcastes. He hung the shirt over the crook of one claw, pondering what it meant. He knew Karkat was a mutant, and that made everything on this entire planet dangerous to him. Everything would want to kill him. That part made sense.

His reaction to it did not. The fact that the wardrobifier was pre-programmed with this blank gray sign that wasn’t real and an allowance akin to that of a rustblood did not make sense.

Karkat, innocent and unknowing, not minding the blood that streaked its vile (holy) color across his skin, wobbled on shaky legs and curled up against Crabdad, purring. The crab lusis dropped one claw down to soothe his charge, combing residual slime from his wild hair.

The lusis knew his job was not to ponder the politics of adult trolls. His job was merely to make sure that his charge survived to Ascension, bloodcolor be damned, and as he looked down at the sleepy Karkat pressed against his side, using the new shirt as a pillow to cradle his head from the hard edges of the lusis’s carapace, and Crabdad knew that he would do anything for the young troll.


	2. The Middle

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ALL ABOARD THE FAMILY FEELS TRAIN!!!!!!

In time, Crabdad managed to fatten his charge back up after the drain of his first pupation. Karkat lost the stick-thin, overstretched look. He learned how to walk, to run, to climb. Crabdad dipped into Karkat’s allowance to order the reading programs and schoolfeeding videos that he needed. The videos were caste-appropriate of course, tailored to rust-bloods, and in time Karkat also learned to speak Alternian and not the clicking growls and snaps that they used to communicate together. At three sweeps old, Karkat was a fine young troll. Smart as a steelpin, fast with his hands and even faster with his tongue. 

Karkat learned other things as well, no matter how hard his lusis tried to hide them from him. Crabdad kept the curtains closed, the doors locked, and the hive’s defenses in place. He gave Karkat his first strife specibus- bladekind, which Karkat quickly adapted to sickle-kind to better match the crab’s claws, and the lusis made sure his charge knew how to use them. 

Karkat didn’t leave his hive often, and when he did it was to snarl at the lowblooded neighbors that shared his hivering. The trolls were still young enough that Crabdad didn’t fear them yet. They were too unskilled to pose much of a danger and their lusii were smaller, weaker. They were the lusii of the lowest bloods, and the crab didn’t fear them either. That would change in time as the trolls learned that the best way to stay alive was to kill other trolls and lusii before they could attack first. But there was still a few more perigrees of gracetime before the games began, and Crabdad made sure that Karkat would be ready for them.  
…

 

That was around the time that Karkat figured out that he was different. The sweet spice of blood in the air alerted the huge lusis that something was wrong and left the crab blinking back shock and confusion and no small amount of fear; fear- why was Karkat bleeding Karkat wasn’t allowed to bleed what was hurting him? In the hive? Was something in the hive?

The lusis followed the scent up the stairs to his charge’s block, taking them three at a time, jointed legs creaking. 

Crabdad found him in his respiteblock, sitting cross-legged on the floor and dragging the tip of one of his sickles across the meat of his palm until the blood pooled out and spilled between his fingers. 

Crabdad shrieked- _the blinds were open_ , and lunged forward to draw them closed, hissing madly as he checked outside to make sure no one had seen. Karkat watched him with blank eyes and ground the metal of the sickle stubbornly deeper, his eyes flickering as the blood poured out. It ran from between his fingers like a river. The red dripped from the ends of his claws and pooled across the floor and soaked into the legs of his dark pants, his gray eyes calculating and watchful. 

Crabdad hissed at him, raising his claws as Karkat hissed back, cutting himself even deeper in his stubborn self-destruction until Crabdad threw himself forward and bowled the troll over, his movements jerky with panic.

Karkat screamed, sputtering curses, as Crabdad fought him and took the sickle and set to tearing off the soiled clothes as Karkat shrieked, “Get off me! Get the fuck off me!”

Crabdad ignored him, clutching the bloody clothes to his carapace, resolved to burn them to hide the evidence. He darted to the inceniratorifier and shoved the clothes inside. Karkat followed him, still shrieking, just in time for Crabdad to hit the button and set the clothes on fire in a blaze of flame. 

The lusis watched as the clothes turned to ash. Crabdad left Karkat on the floor, bleeding, to make sure that the front door was still locked, that all the doors were locked and the window blinds drawn tightly closed, before he at last turned back to Karkat, who had fallen strangely silent.

The troll was crying silently, red-tinged tears streaming down his cheeks. His injured hand was clenched into a fist at his side. “I knew it,” he said. “I’m a fucking freak.”

Crabdad chirred sadly, and he waved the troll over to him to inspect the cut on his palm. It wasn’t a bad wound, but it was deep and still bled it’s criminal (innocent) color. Crabdad hid the red and turned Karkat’s hand over, clicking gently as he wiped away his charge’s tears. 

Karkat let the lusis bandage the wound, and he kept oddly silent as the crab worked. Next the lusis scrubbed up each of the spots where the blood had dripped onto the floor with an obsessive intensity. Karkat watched the entire time, and when the crab was done all evidence of the red had been removed.

“Crabdad?” Karkat asked, uncharacteristically slow. “Am I going to die?”

Crabdad peered down into his charge’s gray eyes, ignoring the red-tint to his tears as he whirred and groaned with endless patience. No wriggler of his had died before, a spotless record no other lusis could boast of, and the crab wasn’t about to start losing young trolls now. Especially not to an aberrant (miraculous) bloodcaste error. He let Karkat know this through a series of clicks deep in the bony plates of his throat, reassuringly combing his claws through the wild mane of the troll’s fluffy hair like he had when the troll was younger.

“What the fuck do you know?” Karkat said angrily, shoving the comforting claw away and shrugging free of the crab’s grip. “Is that why I can’t go outside?” He asked, raising his bound hand. “Is this why I can’t have friends? Is this fucking _color_ why I can’t be normal?” There was something fragile and desperate in his voice like he was begging to be proven wrong. 

Crabdad didn’t have the words to answer him, so he huffed and reached out to the monitor on the wall. Karkat watched as he pulled up a simple chart of the hemospectrum, rust at the bottom and tyrian at the top. He clicked again and nudged Karkat closer to the screen.

The young troll squinted at the colors with distrust, each caste broken down into its dozens of individual shades, not one of which came close to the bright red that flowed below Karkat’s skin. Crabdad typed in Vantas under hatchsign, and the error message that he recorded sweeps ago was still in place, the screen staticky and glitchy as the program tried to make sense of the redacted errors. 

“So I’m not supposed to exist,” Karkat concluded bitterly. He wiped the hemospectrum away with a twitch of his fingers and the screen faded to black.

No no no, not that, Karkat might not have fit into any of the troll’s categories but that didn’t mean that his existence was a mistake. It just meant that they had to take some _precautions_ … to ensure that the trolls who didn’t _understand_ what that shade of red meant couldn’t… _overreact_ , to Karkat’s… something. 

Words were not the crab’s strongpoint. The lusis thought in clicks and snaps, the subtle shift of spines and growling shrieks. Expressing out loud the thoughts that tangled in his thinkpan was like dissecting grubloaf and trying to reassemble it’s ingredients, messy and pointless. That particular grub had already been cooked, and , -and…

And one day the Red Cult would be able to explain all of this to him, even the parts that the crab didn’t understand and didn’t dare to imagine. 

But it was too early to say that, and treason to even know those words and Karkat was too young to have that kind of burden weighing on him, so the crab just wordlessly pulled his charge closer and promised in his way of clicking and nuzzling that nothing bad would ever happen to Karkat, not as long as he was there to stop it.  
…

 

Things went well for another half sweep or so. 

Then the game invites began. FLARP. Fiduspawn. Actionarration. Games meant to lure the growing trolls together and have them test their skills and strengths to clear levels, gain treasure, and earn prestige. It was going to be a bloodbath. 

Crabdad ripped up the FLARPing flyer he found slipped under the door to the hive and chewed on the pieces until the wad was unrecognizable. Karkat knew better than to ask about it, but the lusis often caught the troll glancing outside, looking painfully lonely as the hivering neighbors rushed to form teams and make alliances in preparation. 

Karkat took to disposing of the invites himself, snorting with disgust as he thumbed through the colorful pages.

“Who the fuck would ever be dumb enough to try this shit?” he said, laughing to himself as the crab made fresh grubloaf across the block. “What the fuck? Cardgames, but the loser fucking dies? There’s got to be no one dumb enough to think this is a good idea.”

Good ideas were not the point. Karkat know that, so did Crabdad. The game invites stayed forgotten until they stopped arriving all at once. The rest of the hivering learned to avoid their hive and in turn avoid Karkat, partly because Crabdad would attack them on sight and partly because they’d made up their collective minds that Karkat was not worth the effort. A single “rustblood” without a psychic ability didn’t count for anything unless they were looking for cannon fodder. 

It was an uneasy truce. The neighbors left them alone, far too occupied with watching out for themselves as the games started and they began to make enemies.

The killing started. 

Crabdad may have sheltered his charge from the outside world, but he didn’t limit Karkat’s access to technology and Karkat had grown up on Alternian movies and books that framed dying and killing as a core aspect of troll society. The crab had done his part to encourage it, in the past, with purple and violet-blooded wrigglers, those expected to be vicious and show no mercy. He’d celebrated kills and victories with his charges, but it was different when his wriggler wasn’t already at the top of the totem pole in an unfair system designed to be against him from the start. Even in a minor scuffle, Karkat had so much more to lose. 

It hit their hivering slower than others; lowbloods knew better than to challenge the higher castes so soon, but by the end of the second perigree a hive at the end of the path stood empty after it’s bronzeblood didn’t return from a FLARP session. That sobered up the rest of the hivering, and things stayed remarkable quiet for another sweep.

Until Karkat was four and a half sweeps old, and Crabdad returned from hunting in the forest behind their hive to find the front door unlocked and Karkat’s respiteblock door open. There was a note stuck to the wall by a knife, and Karkat’s sickles were gone. 

Reading was also not a strong point with the lusis. He much preferred eating books over reading them, but he squinted and shrieked at the neat words until they made a sad sense to him when he twisted his head to the side and held the paper very close to his beaky face. 

CRABDAD- DON’T WORRY ABOUT ME, I’LL BE BACK SOON. I’M JUST GOING UP THE DRIVEPATH  
WITH THESE TWO TROLLS WHO WERE IN THE AREA TONIGHT. THEY’RE NOT HIGHBLOODS AND THIS  
ISN’T ANYTHING GAME RELATED, SO DON’T FREAK THE FUCK OUT LIKE YOU DO AND EAT THE DRYWALL.  
THAT’S JUST FUCKING DISGUSTING AND IT’S A STUPID BLATENT OVERREACTION. I’LL BE _**FINE.**_  
\- KARKAT.

The crab ripped up the note in his claws, screaming and keening, chittering with panic. Karkat was outside, alone, with strangers, and Crabdad didn’t know where his charge was or what was going on.

He ate the drywall out of frustration. The crunch of the building material gave his jaws something to do while he skittered around the empty hive, ripping things off the walls and flailing. 

It was the dark/lesser dark cycle, so as the night aged and the horizon grew hazy at least Crabdad didn’t have to panic about the killer sun or hordes of the ravenous undead. He still had to panic about LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE, so it was a small comfort. 

The dark morning came and went. The twin moons rose, fell, and began to rise again. Karkat did not return. 

Stupidly, refusing to entertain the thought that something had happened, the crab prepared a veritable feast for his absent wriggler. He made grubloaf, wormcakes, grilled shishish, a pile of dusted frogspawn in jelly. Karkat’s favorites. 

The crab kept staring at the front door, banging pots and pans at top volume, waiting for Karkat to appear. The young troll always wandered in once he smelled food.

Hours passed. The food grew cold. The lusis stared at the set table, then the closed door. Not sure of what else he could do, he wandered about the hive again, slowly this time. He picked up the things that his disorganized wriggler had left strewn from eve to baseboard. He cradled well-worn books in his claws, their pages lovingly folded and marked where Karkat had read parts that he’d especially liked. Sometimes the troll would even read his books out loud to the lusis, explaining what they meant in his grouchy but smooth voice. He folded mismatched socks and a dozen black sweaters, holding them to his beaky face in vain to try and catch a whiff of his charge’s scent.

The hive was still and silent. It felt so empty inside with Karkat gone. The walls were pressing in on the crab, the silence was maddening. Suddenly overwhelmed, the crab dropped everything he’d been carrying onto the floor. Books, clothes, assorted spare weapons and compterbits, it all slid onto the floor with a clatter as the lusis made a mad dash to the door.

Crabdad ran outside and shrieked at the starry sky overhead. There was no answer. He stared up and down the drivepath, waiting, watching, hoping, but there was no sign of his missing wriggler. The inevitable had come early. Karkat wasn’t coming back.  
…

 

Crabdad stayed outside, alone on the dull grass. At long last the fight seemed to go out of him. His claws drooped, his white spines fell, his legs bent low with the weight of him until the entire lusis sagged towards the dirt. 

He went back inside the empty hive, unsure of what else to do. He felt…. Confused. Angry. Alone. 

Lost. That was the word he was looking for-lost. 

He’d lost Karkat. He’d _lost_ him. The huge lusis put one claw against the wall, to rip it, to wreck it, but he just felt an aching hollowness that sapped his strength to do anything but stare at the door and let the sorrow consume him.

The door… creaked. The knob slowly turned, secretive and stealthy. The crab blinked blearily at it, not understanding. 

Karkat opened the door and slipped into the room. He kept his face turned away, and he didn’t turn around until after he’d locked the door behind him, steeling himself.

Crabdad screamed and threw himself forward in an ecstatic rush of jointed legs and pale carapace. He drew himself to a halt when Karkat flinched back, one arm drawn tightly up to his chest as he saved himself from being tackled by a nearly one-ton crab monster. “Wait!”

The lusis paused, clicking with excitement, waving his claws in the air as he danced around his charge. Karkat was back! He was back and he was not dead! Karkat wasn’t lying murdered in a ditch- he was back!

The young troll blinked at the lusis. There were dark circles crusted under his eyes and he looked exhausted. His clothes were stained with mud and grass, the bottom edge and one entire sleeve ripped off. 

Crabdad skrred a question, reeling in the relieved fireworks exploding through his central nervous system. Karkat was hurt. Everything else ground to a sudden, dizzying halt. 

“Hey, Crabdad,” Karkat muttered weakly, giving a small wave with the arm that wasn’t held gingerly to his ribs. “I’m back.”

Crabdad clicked gently, reaching for the troll’s obviously injured arm.

Karkat flinched back again, his eyes blank. “It’s not as bad as it looks,” he said quickly. “I’m…”

The troll never finished his sentence. Instead he sagged against the lusis, taking deep, shuddering breaths. “I’m a fucking idiot,” he hissed, his lip warbling. “I should have listened to you. I’m sorry.”

Crabdad embraced his wriggler and crooned sweetly to him until Karkat, resolved, set his face and started unwrapping the ripped sleeve he’d used to bind and splint his injured arm. Even with his dull nose, the lusis could smell the blood that seeped into the dark fabric.

Karkat winced, his face tight with pain. The troll’s wrist was clearly broken, and there were deep punctures across his palm from his claws. The troll flexed his wrist a few times and gasped at the pain.

“It’s not that bad,” he repeated again, stubbornly, before he sagged again in defeat. “Okay, maybe it is. You were right. You were fucking right about everything. I should be dead now. They were going to kill me.”

The crab gently set to cleaning off the troll’s hand, not touching where the sleeve was still bound to his arm as the troll told his story. It was like removing a skinadhesive or Wound-Aide. It had to be removed in small pieces otherwise it’d peel off the skin it was trying to heal.

“I just wanted to see what it’s like out there,” Karkat said, exhaling in a gasp. “I just wanted to make some friends and actually fucking talk to someone else like a normal fucking troll. I’d never even seen those two trolls before. They were just walking by and I had to see- I had to try, just once.” Karkat bit his lip and Crabdad carefully scrubbed the blood from between his claws and the lines between his slim fingers. The punctures weren’t that bad, but the wrist was broken and swollen. Karkat flinched and tried to pull away every time the lusis tried to move his attention higher, to where he could feel the heat burning under the makeshift bandage, so the crab went slower.

“It’s a fucking shame that I’m such a freak, because it actually went okay at first. Better than okay. It was amazing, they were so cool and different and laidback. They’d even watched all of The Thresh Prince of Bel-Air and they thought my sickles were cool. I walked with them all the way to the hivering by the river where one of them lived, and it was going fucking swell.” Karkat snorted, his eyes tearing up. “Then they asked about my sign,” he sighed, suddenly angry. “And I told them it wasn’t any of their fucking business, and they laughed and I thought it was over. Then he clawed my hand as he said bye. They were laughing like the whole thing was a joke until they saw the color.”

Crabdad paused as his wriggler sniffled. “You can guess what happened next,” he said bitterly. “It became a game of ‘let’s cull the freak’, and they tried to make it slow. It didn’t matter- I got away. I had to break my fucking wrist to do it but I got away.”

Karkat was crying now, shaking. He turned his head away and squeezed his eyes shut when Crabdad started to unwind the sleeve from his forearm. The loose fabric threads had dried into the scabs and they cracked when the sleeve was removed so that the wounds bled again, peeling and cracking open as the lusis slid the sleeve slowly back. Karkat resolutely did not look at the damage as Crabdad squinted at the strange, angled lines cut down his wriggler’s arm and carved into his flesh. The word revealed itself like a brand- _**Mutant.**_

They’d cut him. They’d _carved_ him.

The ugly letters were weeping red, the gray skin around them puffy and inflamed. The lusis stared at the deep wounds, his bloodpusher aching with a profound sorrow. The crab fought the urge to hide the wound, to not stare at the evidence marked in red down Karkat’s arm in sharp Alternian script. Karkat was still crying, taking small gasping breaths as he clung to his lusis’s body. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so fucking sorry. I should never have left the hive. You were right.”

Crabdad was still staring at the cuts, chittering. The letters would scar- one more thing for his wriggler to hide. The lusis looked at the locked door, his spines raising. The trolls who had done this knew about his charge’s bloodcolor. The understanding and the panic hit in a single blow. Someone knew.

“Don’t fucking bother,” Karkat said when the crab took a step to the door, his intent clear as he peeked out of the blinds to make sure no trolls were gathering up the pitchforks and the firestaves on the grass outside. 

Crabdad clicked a quick question at his wriggler, and Karkat stared sadly back at him. “They’re not going to come after me,” he said, holding his lusis’s gaze. “I killed them.”

Most of the lusis was instantly relieved. The other 14% was horrified and organ-sick. 

Karkat cried harder, and the crab comforted him the best he could as the troll stuttered out the rest of his story. “The first wasn’t looking. He didn’t know I’d gotten free. It was easy, so fucking easy.” Karkat shuddered, his entire short frame wracked with sobs. “The second one was… harder. Shit, she was his fucking moirail and she was furious and screaming and I couldn’t hold my sickle right and everything looked sideways and I should have died but I didn’t, because I won. Somehow. So yeah, they’re both dead. I couldn’t let them live, not after… they saw me. They didn’t fucking _let me_ let them live.”

Karkat swallowed his next breath, his voice choked as Crabdad rocked him gently back and forth, crooning. “And I thought I was so much better than everyone else because I hadn’t killed anyone and all I wanted to do was make friends, and I killed them because they wouldn’t let me live.”

Crabdad finished cleaning the cuts and bound Karkat’s arm with a fresh, clean bandage. He lifted one of Karkat’s sweaters off of the pile on the floor and helped him into it, ignoring the spots of olive and gold flaked at the bottom hem of the ruined sweater.

He held onto Karkat until he cried himself out, and then he guided his freshly cleaned and bandaged charge over to the still-set table to make sure that Karkat got some food in him. 

The troll blinked at the abundance of food, his eyes skipping over the obvious furrows in the wall and the broken plates that littered the back counter. “Did you make all of this for me?” Karkat asked, not quite smiling, not yet, but not looking miserable for the first time since he’d walked through the door.

Crabdad gave an enthusiastic chirp and began piling food in front of his wriggler. 

Karkat huffed, wiping at his eyes again as he latched onto Crabdad’s claw and just…. Held on. “Thank you,” Karkat said, and his lusis carded his other claw through the troll’s wild hair, grateful beyond words that his wriggler was still with him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to hug tiny baby Karkat. Crabdad is trying his best. This is not an ideal upbringing in any way, shape, or form, but as far as trolls go that' a fairly universal statement. Alternia sucks, and it sucks worse for Karkat and Crabdad. 
> 
> It's different, writing this. I'm trying to keep this as light as possible without ignoring what's actually going on. There are things happening all around them, even while Karkat is stuck inside his hive. Their world is growing up with him. 
> 
> It's kinda funny, right? That whole part about Crabdad ripping things off the walls, eating drywall, and flailing?? It's in character and its funny but then you put three seconds of thought into it and suddenly its not funny anymore. 
> 
> But can I blame him? Blame Karkat? Blame anyone?
> 
> IDK I just have too many family feels  
> (also check out my tumblr if you want to scream at me some more. it's trypticcognizen)


	3. The End

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here it is! the last past on this sneak peek into Karkat's wrigglerhood and just in time for 6/12!
> 
> Happy hatchday Karkat!

Karkat’s arm and wrist healed. The troll didn’t try to leave the hive again- he’d learned his lesson the hard way. 

It hurt Crabdad to see his wriggler so off-put. Karkat was quieter now. He trained harder with his sickles and he’d stopped reading to the lusis at dawn before he retired to his recooperacoon for the day. To fix this, the lusis broke into Karkat’s account again and ordered his charge a copy of a popular chat client. Meeting other trolls in the flesh was potentially fatal, but with a screen and a few thousand miles between them the lusis thought it could work. The thought still made his carapace itch, but this “Trollian” could pull Karkat out of the bleak mood he’d settled into after ‘The Incident’, it was worth a try.

He left the program running on Karkat’s husktop for the troll to find on his own.

It was entertaining to see Karkat grow into the idea of using the chat client. The entire time the troll would ignore the program blinking at the corner of his husktop screen, but he never closed the program. It took a perigree or two for Karkat to warm up to the idea, and once he’d made up his mind about using the program there was no stopping him. 

Crabdad watched proudly as Karkat, resolved to reach out at the rest of trollkind again, unbroken and unafraid, set up his account. There were still precautions. 

Account: carcinoGeneticist

Font:gray

Memoboards: blocked! Click here to rearm account blockers!

Type your first chat here in the box below to lock the account settings!

[carcinoGeneticist (CG) began Trolling carcinoGeneticist (CG): IS THIS FUCKING THING WORKING?]  


Settings locked!

The crab laughed roughly to himself, grating chirps that scratched at the back of his throat. His wriggler typed in all caps, which were the easiest letters for the lusis to understand. 

“Oh fuck off,” Karkat said without looking up from the screen, flushed slightly darker with embarrassment. “Do you have to fucking hover over me like that? It’s just a husktop program. It’s not even that interesting.”

The crab could take the hint, and he made himself scarce in the trees behind the hive after eating all of the leftover honey Karkat had been hoarding. His wriggler had a sweet tooth. The lusis thought it was cute. Karkat was the best wriggler. It was official, even if Crabdad couldn’t get away with calling the troll a wriggler anymore. 

Crabdad had to screech at Karkat to get him to come down for dinner, and the troll yelled back without leaving his respiteblock. 

“Give me a minute, you overgrown crustacean! I am trying to have a fucking conversation!”

Crabdad chortled to himself, slyly fixing a plate to take up to his charge. His grand scheme was working perfectly. 

Karkat was seated at his desk, his eyes fixed on the glowing screen of his husktop. Crabdad onovtrusivly set the plate of food gently beside his wriggler, i.e, he slammed the food down loudly and leaned over Karkat’s head to spy on the screen, knocking over a jar of pens and metal bits with his claws as he peered at the screen.

Karkat huffed but otherwise ignored him, busy trying a reply to the yellow words that filled the husktop’s monitor. 

TA: 2o liike ii wa2 2ayiing, the gen 3 ii2 clearly 2uperior two previiou2 attempt2. The grub-mod ii2 ju2t 2o much better than the old wiire-enca2ed bull2hiit gen one u2ed and any troll wiithout the braiinpower two know otherwii2e ii2 beyond help.   
TA: They shouldn’t even be allowed near a fuckiing hu2ktop.  
CG: THAT’S OUTRAGEOUS. GEN THREE IS AN OVERWROUGHT PILE OF BEHEMOTH LEAVINGS THAT’S SO OVERSATURATED WITH HACKING MODS THAT IT’S ORIGIONAL PURPOSE IS FUCKING BURIED BENEATH IS OWN BULLSHIT!  
CG: GEN TWO IS CLEARLY THE BEST OPTION.  
TA: You motherfucker. ii 2iincerely hope that you’re just tryiing two fuck with me. No one can actually be that 2tupiid.  
CG: FUCK YOU ASSHOLE!  
CG: AT LEAST I KNOW HOW TO FUCKING SPELL STUPID RIGHT.  
TA: Holy 2hiit you can’t be fuckiing 2eriiou2.  
TA: ahahahahahaha thii2 ii2 ju2t two easy.

Karkat grunted, furiously typing away.

“It has come to my attention that I have no idea how to make friends with people,” Karkat said, still madly typing in a flurry of gray. “I’ve also realized that I don’t fucking care! This stupid motherfucker is wrong and I cannot let him get away with his piss-poor hacking mods. Gen two is better and I’m going to fucking prove it to this smug asshole.”

Crabdad clicked low in his throat, chortling. Karkat was still typing away, oblivious to the crab’s profound glee. The lusis left his charge to his online conversation, satisfied that his plan was working.  
…

Things did get better after that. In a real way. The lines down Karkat’s arm healed and the troll took to wearing long sleeves to cover the damning word. Crabdad knew Karkat had been severely shaken by what had happened, but talking with other trolls helped. It helped a lot.

Crabdad learned to recognize the trolls Karkat regularly spoke with by text color. The yellow bastard was Sollux, and for some reason the both of them enjoyed squabbling over technology. In response and to better argue with the yellowblood, Karkat took up hacking with mediocre skill, which did nothing but escalate their arguments.

Somehow this was exactly why both of them liked it. The lusis didn’t quite get it, but who was he to judge? 

Kanaya was the one with the jade text. Crabdad liked her, and the one who typed in teal as well. The tealblood was the one that had Karkat staying up late into the dawn, chatting away with the barest hint of a smile on his face. 

Those were the good friends. There were others that popped up and vanished into oblivion, other trolls whose friendships didn’t stick or logged out of their accounts forever or were culled unexpectedly. But Karkat maintained a small, tightly knit group of trolls that he regularly talked to and the difference in Karkat that these names on a screen made was stunning. 

Crabdad got to watch his wriggler blossom. He got to see Karkat start to grow into himself, hesitantly, but with a stubborn spiteful dignity that the hemocaste spectrum couldn’t snuff out. It was like the night that Crabdad first saw Karkat, his bulbous body covered in ash and mud, hissing and growling and baring tiny teeth, that sudden flash of insight the crab had that this small grub would grow up to be someone, someone precious and important. Someone who would challenge things and change things and maybe even make some new things. The troll had that fire back in him.

Karkat began wanting things, which was dangerous. He didn’t want them in the same way that he’d wanted before, when he’d dreamed of going outside and seeing the world. That bit of foolishness had hardened, distilled itself into something different. He studied harder, trained more, dreamed of being a Threshecutioner. he sought out ways and means to live past eight sweeps and snarled and growled as he plotted.

Of course, Crabdad worried endlessly about his young troll. The crab didn’t like seeing the purple that began appearing more and more often on Karkat’s Trollian, or even worse, the violet, though that name wasn’t as common as the other. 

Meeting with highbloods was at best deadly and at worse completely suicidal, but that was the miracle of technology. The gray Karkat hid behind let him get close to castes so far removed and above him that the difference made Crabdad’s carapace itch and burn with discomfort. Karkat thought it was fucking hilarious that these highblooded trolls, even the royal shades, had no idea who they were talking with. 

Crabdad did not agree. He’d spent enough time with purples to know how they acted, how they thought. How easily they killed. Karkat talking so frequently with this Gamzee character did not bode well. 

But then this Gamzee fucker dropped the “M” word on Karkat and left Crabdad to deal with its aftermath. 

This wasn’t the first time the crab had to wage through the putrid mire of a troll’s first quadrant, but with Karkat it was something special. 

Crabdad found him pacing the floor of his respiteblock, caught in a panic. Crabdad had to smother his instinctive reaction to the sight of a distressed Karkat, which was with screaming and flailing, and considered the situation carefully. He couldn’t afford to have this dissolve into a shrieking match between the two of them, not when Karkat needed some genuine advice. 

The crab’s feelings about other trolls that were not his, like other lusii, tended to default immediately to ‘threat’. Eat first, ask questions never. It was too risky to act in any other way, but Karkat wasn’t the first troll to ever catch pale feelings and he wasn’t going to be the last. 

“Crabdad,” Karkat asked, turning away from the screen as he blinked back panic, his breath shaky. “What do I do? He wants to be moirails and I like him a lot and his lusus fucking sucks ass and he’s alone all the time and he says he likes talking with me- that it actually helps him deal with himself! He likes talking with me! What the fuck should I do?”

Crabdad patiently waited for Karkat to get it all out. “I know we’ve been trolling each other for perigrees, but what if this is too fast? What if he doesn’t actually…” Karkat cut himself off, choking back the words as his cheeks colored red in an embarrassed blush. “I’m… I’m really working myself up over this,” he realized, blushing harder. 

Crabdad rolled his eyes and nudged the troll closer to his husktop with a massive claw, urging Karkat to just answer the other troll. This wasn’t something that Crabdad could solve, and even though his wriggler was insanely bright, Karkat was also stupidly oblivious sometimes. The lusus nudged him again, harder, his legs dragging across the floor as he herded the troll over to his desk and plopped him down before the glowing screen, clicking with irritation as Karkat at last began to catch on.

“You… want me to talk to him?” Karkat asked. The crab nodded, clacking his beak and waving his claws. The obvious seemed to dawn on the troll slowly. “I thought you didn’t approve of Gamzee?”

Crabdad screeched, hissing, and Karkat rolled his eyes, huffing with embarrassment and reluctance that gave way to excitement as he considered the grape-colored words pasted across his husktop. “Wow,” Karkat said, skimming over the words he’d missed while caught in his first quadrant-meltdown. The young troll ran a hand through his fluffy hair, not meeting Crabdad’s expectant gaze. “He’s really freaking out too,” the troll admitted, blushing harder. “I guess I’d better… see if I can help? With that? With calming him down?”

The lusus resisted the urge to beat his head, neck, and shoulders into the nearest flat surface at his charge’s hesitant questions. Wrigglers. They were always the same! 

Crabdad retreated back downstairs to his lair and left his charge to handle this. When Karkat appeared at dawn, he seemed… calmer. He walked downstairs like some of the weight had left his shoulders, his spine straighter, his eyes not so shadowed.

Karkat sat down at the table without much fanfare, the faintest of small smiles flickering across his lips. 

“Hey, Crabdad,” he said, picking at his grubloaf with a three-pronged eating utensil. “I think I have a moilrail.”

The huge crab hit himself in the face with his own claw, sighing with exasperation.  
…

Even though Crabdad was secretly sweating fucking rocks over the fact that his wriggler’s moirail was a budding subjugglator, most of him was deeply relieved that Karkat has an opportunity to have at least one successful quadrant. 

And a small, selfish part of his hindbrain knew that having such a highblooded and important troll as a quadrant might one day offer Karkat a smidgeon of hope for surviving to adulthood. Some of the highest bloods could sway amnesty for moirails who would have been culled otherwise. Maybe, just maybe, this Gamzee would one day have that kind of pull with the Empress. That was if this Gamzee didn’t cull Karkat himself if he ever found out why the other troll only typed in gray. 

That was still a sweeps-away kind of problem, and the lusis had gotten very good at ignoring those kinds of issues. The present was what mattered the most. It eased a bit of the crab's burden to know that he could give Karkat this one thing, and it hurt even worse to remember all the reasons why he couldn't give Karkat everything else. He wanted to give his charge everything. He wanted for Karkat to have a normal life so bad that it was a constant ache under his carapace.

Crabdad quickly became familiar with each of Karkat’s friends as the perigrees passed. Karkat took to explaining everything that was going on in each of their lives to the crab, much like he’d done with the books he’d read aloud to the lusus when he was younger. 

“And Terezi thinks that I’ll make a great Threshecutioner one day. She and Vriska are still buddy-buddy, even though I keep telling her that Vriska is an unstable egotistical maniac. But she always rebukes me by saying I’m some kind of fucking hypocrite because I always defend Gamzee when he’s acting clowny and hiveshit.” The troll pausing and set down the sickle he was sharpening. “Actually, that was the thing I was going to tell you. Terezi, Vriska, Tavros, and Aradia are all going to start a FLARP session soon. Together. As a team.” 

Karkat shuddered and set the weapon down, his eyes narrowed. “It’s going to end badly, I just fucking know it! But none of them will listen to me.” he scoffed to cover up his worry. “Terezi promised me that nothing would happen, because if they’re on the same side then not even Vriska would go out of her way to sabotage a teammate, not when she’s so obsessed with winning, but I just can’t believe that Aradia would take this kind of risk, and Tavros isn’t going to fucking stand up for himself and.. I just don’t want anyone getting hurt.” 

Sometimes, the lusis wondered if he was doing right by Karkat in keeping him so isolated. Necessity and secrecy be damned. The troll was outgoing, social, compassionate, and he was going stir-crazy with his friends voluntarily endangering themselves outside of his reach. 

Crabdad just wished that one day, Karkat wouldn’t be held back by the stigma of his bloodcolor. His wriggler was something special- and one day the Empire would be forced to reckon with this small, off-spectrum mutant, and the lusus had a sneaking suspicion that when that time came nothing in all creation would be able to hold Karkat back.  
….

 

Karkat’s assumptions had been proven correct by the end of the perigree.

That Tavros troll had been wounded, something cullable and permanent probably, but Crabdad couldn’t summon enough care beyond being distressed that this ordeal was upsetting Karkat. At least Terezi was okay, which meant that his wriggler’s transparent flush-crush was thankfully unscathed. No one had even been killed, so what was the problem?

Crabdad just shrugged. These were not his wrigglers and their problems were not his own, and so by extension, not Karkat’s either. This was not the response that his charge was hoping for, though he was clearly not surprised by it. 

Karkat only grew more frustrated with his lusus’s lack of understanding. 

“What is your fucking problem?” Karkat demanded, baring his teeth, his eyes red-tinged with unshed tears. “I know you don’t actually give a shit, but can’t you at least act like you do? That’s like the bare minimum! The bar of good custodianship is set so low that I’m amazed that you were able to shovel your way down to dig beneath it.”

The insult rolled off the crab’s thick carapace. Crabdad let out a thin questioning skree, not understanding what was wrong, and Karkat snarled in response and slammed the door between them so hard that the walls rattled. 

Things only got worse from there, and after Terezi was blinded by her former teammate Karkat cried again and locked himself in his respiteblock. Someone else died, Aradia maybe? At least the offending blueblood was wrecked in vengeance by the young Legislacerator. Things like this always escalated- that was why the crab tried so hard to keep Karkat away from that life. That was all the lusus understood. The details on the whole event were foggy, but the end result was a very mopey Karkat who spend more and more time trolling his moirail.

Crabdad did all he could to rouse his charge, but nothing he did was working. All of his usual tactics fell short of achieving any satisfactory goal. 

Karkat only perked up again after his oldest friend began trolling him about some new game he was trying to get a team together for.

WHICH WAS TERRIFYING! KARKAT WAS NOT ALLOWED TO PARTICIPATE IN GAMES! EVER!

Karkat fended the lusus off, snarling from the effort it took to hold back the crab as he strained and skreed in distress. “It’s not that kind of game!” He explained, growling, a spark of fire in his gray eyes. “It’s a computer game! I’m not leaving the hive and I’m not meeting them! It’ll be perfectly safe!” 

Crabdad was not okay with this at all. Games were bad. Games were just more ways for Karkat to get discovered and get hurt, but the troll’s sixth hatchday was rapidly approaching and Crabdad couldn’t bear to withhold this one thing from his wriggler, not when Karkat so dearly had his bloodpusher set on it. 

That didn’t mean he made it easy for Karkat. In-between interfering with Karkat’s nightly activities and preparing for his 6th hatchday, the crab also did a lot of spying. He did not like the sound of this game, SGRUB, but from what Karkat told him it was a computer game and nothing else. 

The messages he stole off Karkat’s husktop in snatched glances didn’t quite line up with this statement. Were they going to try and meet up? Was Sollux really planning something? If this was his idea, why did the yellowblood sound so scared?

Karkat wasn’t making any obvious plans to leave the hive and all of his chat buddies lived extremely far away- too far to attempt unprepared. The crab could not wrap his head around it. He was stumped. 

He wandered back downstairs. Karkat was sharpening his favorite pair of sickles, which was normal. But the troll’s movements stood out anyway. The press of the blade against the stone, the bright pops of sparks, the rolling twinge of Karkat’s back and shoulders as he checked and rechecked the keen edges, even obsessively rewrapping the hilts… something was definitely going on. 

Crabdad shrieked a question. Karkat looked up, his eyes shifty. “What?”

The lusus screamed again, and this time his charge had the decency to look ashamed at the worried tone of the crab’s growling shriek. “I’m sorry Crabdad,” Karkat quickly apologized. “I’m just stressing about the game. Sollux says it’ll start soon.”

The crab shreed another question, stepping closer and dipping his head to flatten Karkat’s wild hair again. The troll frowned, but he didn’t pull away. 

“Sollux has been saying a lot of things,” Karkat admitted. “I think he’s full of shit.”

Crabdad didn’t pay the words any mind. That one piece of hair at the back was stubbornly sticking upright, and he was determined to smoothen it down as his wriggler continued. “He’s got to be full of shit, right? There’s no such thing as a curse.”

Crabdad narrowed his eyes and attacked the stubborn bovinebeast lick with fresh vigor and now Karkat pulled away, staring at his with bright gray eyes. He looked older, more grown. Nearly six sweeps old and his horns were still nearly invisible in the mane of untamable hair that enveloped them. 

“I don’t want to believe it,” Karkat said slowly. Crabdad cocked his head at him, blinking. “Sollux told me a lot of things, but it can’t be true. I wouldn’t believe it except that he’s Sollux so of fucking course he fixed a killer apocalypse game because he’s just that much of a moron, and because Terezi… she said that she thinks she woke up there- in the game, after Vriska blinded her. She said it looked gold. It was the last thing she ever saw.” 

Karkat took a deep breath. “I don’t know what I believe,” he said. “But some guardian-curse? That’s bullshit. I know it is. Everything else though? I’m not so sure anymore. The world’s gone fucking insane.”

Crabdad croaked low in his throat and rattled chirps and clicks at the troll. Karkat sighed, his face clearing.

“You’re right, Crabdad” he said, leaning against the crab’s jointed leg. “It’ll be okay. I promise. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

The crab hummed happily, tangling his claw through Karkat’s hair. Crabdad wasn’t too sure what was going on, but he knew that he believed his wriggler. He loved Karkat- loved him, and he knew that his charge loved him back. 

Whatever it was that was worrying Karkat, Crabdad was sure that they could handle it, that Karkat could handle it. His small, tiny wriggler had grown into a fine young troll, and one day, the lusus knew that the troll he’d raised would make a difference. Would the Red Cult come for him, like the crab suspected? Would the Empire find them first? Would it hurt very badly, watching them take Karkat away? No- no he wouldn’t let that happen. Thoughts of the future scared him still- so much was unknown! So the lusus contented himself with remaining firmly in the present moment, him and Karkat, together and safe from whatever the outside world might do. 

Crabdad stayed like that, humming quietly as Karkat embraced him like he hadn’t done in perigrees, as they sat in the hive they’d made together and waited for the morning to come.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We all know what happens next. The ending was not the point- it was the journey of getting there that mattered. 
> 
> ... I'm still having family feels. I think I have one more Davekat one-shot in me before the other shoe drops. After that it's game on.
> 
> Scream at me if you want on my tumblr (trypticcognizen) because I definitely deserve it after ending the fic like this, but what else could I have done? Cannon has tied my hands this time.

**Author's Note:**

> This is about to get fun!


End file.
